Trunk Tales of Louis Vuitton

In a surprisingly scandalous piece last week, GQ waxes lyrical about Bradley Cooper’s worn-in pair of Louis Vuitton Beverly Hills Sneakers.

Its descriptor is akin to Miss Mary-Kate Olsen’s mangled mint-green BBag: “the upper has literally changed color. The toebox was permanently wrinkled.

The midsole was stained and worn out. The laces were frayed. Even the precious Louis Vuitton logos somehow rubbed off.”

Comments on the official Instagram ranged from “People are dying…” to “I’d let Bradley Cooper wear me into the ground.” And yes, yes, I would.

Yet moral transgressions aside, there’s also something profoundly poetic about sporting ostentatiously showy street-style sneaks from a 170-odd year-old trunk-maker… and wearing them to death while at it.

Call it the essence of luxury, if you will, but in Mr. Cooper’s favored footwear, I saw the versatility of Vuitton’s vast repertoire of trunk-making; one that, over the years, has been transformed into everything from a library to a jukebox to casino to a repository of sneakers for sneakerheads like Mr. Cooper.

And one that remains just as beloved to this day.

A Backstory to Boot

By now we know nearly all there is to know about Monsieur Vuitton’s voyage (that too, on foot!) as a thirteen year-old from the mountains of Eastern France to Paris, working odd jobs along the way and training as a carpenter before finally landing an apprenticeship under trunk-maker Romain Marechal at the French capital more than two years after he’d started off.

But it was 17 years later – roughly the tenure of his apprenticeship – that he was finally able to put his own foot in the trade with a storefront on Rue Neuve des Capucines that read “Securely packs the most fragile objects. Specializing in packing fashions.” It was 1854, and Louis Vuitton as we know it was born.

Craft and clientele aside, Vuitton was committed to reinventing the dome-topped day-luggage (designed to drain the water off and prevent leakage) with stackable, flat-topped trunks in specialty waterproof canvas called Gris Trianon.

The uptick in travel – and with that, booming business – in the tail-end of the 19^th century soon led the signature material, an early trademark for the house, to be known as Vuittonite.

And those trunks? Still a staple to date!

A Canvas for Creativity

Of course, it makes sense that with design as indispensable to the house’s origins, the trunk would soon be subject to rework and redesign. An aluminum iteration from 1892 – then considered one of its most luxurious models – sold for a record-breaking £162,500 at Christie’s London in 2018, for instance.

But with the proliferation of copycats (yes, even back then), hard-sided luggage had its first makeover in the 1870s in red-striped canvas. This was followed by the now-unmistakable Damier checkerboard print in 1888. Finally, under Monsieur Vuitton’s son, Georges, the interlocking initials and floral iconography that we know today were copyrighted in 1905.

Customers, however, have the option to customize. French explorer Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza notably used Vuitton’s Trunk Bed in a 1905 expedition, exiled Russian Princess Lobanov de Rostov’s Desk Trunk was perfumed and pink. The manuscript to Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, as legend has it, was discovered posthumously in the basement of The Ritz Paris inside the acclaimed author’s Louis Vuitton Library Trunk!

And it’s not just patrons; designers also continue to reinvent the trunk.

Takashi Murakami’s Multicolore Marilyn Trunk from 2007 housed 33 different Multicolore bags within its walls (and sold for a whopping $500,000). The “Cowmooflage” (in cow-print) and the “Damoflage”– a digitized take on the Damier formulated by pixel-artist E.T. Sharing for Pharrell’s debut menswear lineup – features on the silhouette, and it even starred in “Treasure Trunks”, the label’s foray into the virtual-verse of NFTs!

A Pop-Culture Prodigy!

Therefore, for the 200th anniversary of Monsieur Vuitton’s birth, the label tapped 200 creatives to reimagine the original 50 x 50 x 100 cm trunk. London-based Ben Ditto’s vacuum-sealed and glowing-green “infectious waste” trunk… was actually made from infectious bacteria, while AD100 designer Pierre Yovanovitch’s “container of ideas” featured alongside Stephen Sprouse’s original 2001 graffiti version.

But it was Peter Marino’s black belted box that harked back to one of the Vuitton trunk’s first high-profile pop-culture moments: when Harry Houdini was asked to pick on the brand’s distinctive single-lock system.

Disappointingly, Houdini never rose to the challenge, and the ‘unpickable’ S-lock remains in production – and still unpickable!

In fact, such pop-culture moments abound aplenty when it comes to the Vuitton trunk. For legendary movie stars, reality royalty, and their celebrity starlet nepo-babies trawling through the TSA gate-check at LAX and JFK, the brand’s logo-drenched luggage remains one of the great equalizers, way back from the days of Empress Eugenie, wife of Napoléon III, all the way to the Kardashians.

“Nicky Hilton Rothschild,” writes Architectural Digest, “uses one as a console table in her New York City penthouse. Two are stacked at the foot of the bed in the guest room of Sig Bergamin’s São Paulo home. Yet another is at the center of Michael Kors’s closet.”

And most recently, Doechii paid tribute to the late André Leon Talley ahead of the Met Gala in a red and white tracksuit flanked by several LV trunks, tennis racket in hand, referencing the former Vogue editor’s iconic original photo!

A Mother to the Others

But you’d be mistaken to think that Louis Vuitton is content with simply wheeling in the luggage across its runway shows and calling it a day.

Not that it isn’t doing that, of course. These signature boxy baggages, along with haute hat boxes, Vernis vanity cases, and hard-sided briefcases that double as wearable works of art, have also been used to unveil pieces from Vuitton’s collaboration with Timberland!

For SS25, on the other hand, Nicolas Ghesquière sent models strutting down a runway fashioned out of more than a thousand pieces of the Maison’s archival trunks! So, what did these models carry then, you ask?

The original Malle trunk silhouette has since been adapted into the Petite Malle, with shrunken details that perfect the design down to the signature S-lock clasp. The Trianon, similarly, utilizes wood trimmings reminiscent of the label’s Courrier Lozine 110 and Malle Haute 110 trunks.

The Malletage pattern, a plush, padded lambskin quilting used initially to line trunks and safeguard their contents, appears across the GO-14 range.

And of course, there’s the Side-Trunk, a softer silhouette with reinforced metal corners, allowing crossbody carry for the millennial girlies.

Heck, even Bradley Cooper’s lush leather skater-inspired sneaks are said to reference those historically luxe trunks and echo Vuitton’s design philosophy. Are we buying into that product description? Probably not. But are we still buying those bags and sneakers? Of course!

There’s, after all, 170 years of history to them!